This is the first course in a Coursera Specialization track involving Web Application Architectures. This course will give you the basic background, terminology and fundamental concepts that you need to understand in order to build modern full stack web applications. A full stack web developer is familiar with each "layer" of the software technologies involved in a web application, including data modeling and database technologies, the web server environment and middleware components, network protocols, the user interface and basic visual design and user interaction concepts.
In this course we will learn by doing. We will start by learning the major components of web application architectures, along with the fundamental design patterns and philosophies that are used to organize them. You will build and continually refine a fully functional full-stack web application as we progress through the modules in this course. Along the way you will be exposed to agile software development practices, numerous tools that software engineers are expected to know how to use, and a modern web application development framework.
This course is also available in Spanish. To join the Spanish version, visit this page: https://www.coursera.org/learn/apliweb.

From the lesson

Module #2 - Web Applications Frameworks

In this module you will learn about web application frameworks. We will start by talking about the evolution of software and programming languages, and then talk about software application frameworks. The fundamental trade-off we will consider is programmer productivity versus program efficiency. Next you will learn about web application frameworks, as well as the model-view-controller design pattern that is the backbone for many of these frameworks. We will also consider how these frameworks support the agile programming principles associated with modern software practice. This will include a discussion of distributed version control systems and you will learn how to use the popular Git system. We will also demonstrate how to use Git with a Ruby on Rails application. We will use Git to submit all of the programming applications in this specialization.